Idéopinions: Microsoft Leadership Summit 2012 review

So here's my take at this year's MSCLS (Twitter @mscls2012 or #mscls2012).

I have to start by saying how enjoyable the flight with Jet Blue really was. This is a very user friendly airline. Minor details such as no cart are circulating in the aisles. Flight attendants are taking your drink/meal orders then come back with a tray, just like any restaurant. This allows passengers to freely circulate if they need to go to the bathroom or simply standup in the aisle to stretch their legs. They also left nuts/crackers available at all time near the restrooms. They also don't have a business class section. This allows for more legroom. Their aircraft are fairly recent and all seats have free satellite TVs/Radio (XM) and Pay-Per-View movies. Small initiatives but making a big difference in the overall customer experience. Last but not least, they are not charging a penny for the first checked-in bag. I chose to fly out of Burlington to JFK then Seattle. The cost was also cheaper than their competition. From now on, I'm not choosing anything else but Jet Blue. And this is not a sponsored message :-)

I took some time on my own to visit parts of Washington State by driving in and out of Seattle where I saw nice little towns, mountains and rivers. I've been privileged to visit WA on many occasions and I'm still amazed on how beautiful this state is.

On to the conference. Generally speaking, this year's CLS was a great one. The Welcome Reception was held at the Lucky Strike bowling lanes facility. In my opinion, this place is too crowdie and noisy to encourage peering with our fellow attendees. It was better at The Parlor last year. Billiard halls are usually less noisy by nature and I felt it was easier networking with others.

The first day of the Conference was good. I think that the Microsoft Conference Center is a classy meeting facility, although the WiFi access would definitely need some improvements. I have heard many attendees complaining about the slowness and difficulty accessing the internet. Breakfast and meals in general are healthy and good.

The morning started with highly professional talks surrounding the Montréal Canadians new GM during breakfast. Then we learned that that Eric Gales was stepping down from his President role for Microsoft Canada to be replaced by Max Long. Full story here.

The first keynote speaker of the day was bestselling author Steve Johnson on Innovative Environments: Cultivating Innovative Thinking (Why am I hearing the Youtube cat saying "Oh long Johnson" all of a sudden?). This was quite insightful. He covered ideas such as:

The Slow Hunch: Great ideas are not always Eureka moments. Some take more thinking, more time to build, sometime years. Organizations should make room for such progressive thinking to encourage innovation;
The Adjacent Possible: Building on existing ideas and/or technologies. Many of today's great inventions were built on a previous technology. The first newspaper press was inspired by a grape press to extract the juice and make wine. Context is also important; As much as the microwave oven is a good idea, it could not have been invented in the 16th century when there was no electricity
Liquid Networks: This was a very entertaining piece and quite informative. The principle is that you hardly can force people to be creative. They have to be in a proper environment. People tend to be less creative in an formal environment, hence the "liquid network", i.e. networking with different minded people in a casual environment such as a coffee shop or a bar.
Diversity: If you form networks with people working on different kinds of problems, you'll be more likely to discover a new approach to your own problems in your own field.

The second speaker of the morning was Doug Kennedy, Vice President, Microsoft Dynamics & Existing Customer Service Programs, discussing Microsoft Business Solutions. It was nice to see the integration in between the different platforms but it really was nothing new to me. Being a technologist myself, I would've appreciated a little more in-depth view of the products.

After lunch, Steven Martin, GM Business Planning Development, Azure, came to share his Perspective on Cloud Computing and Customer Adoption. To me this was more of a marketing speech on the cloud services offered by Microsoft. Nothing really new was said.

We then had a choice of breakout sessions. My first choice was Unlocking ROI through Innovation. This session looked very promising but unfortunately, the room was full by the time I got there. I ended up attending Agile Solution Development - Delivering Business Value Back to the Enterprise, which, at first, was very promising but turned out to be a presentation on how Caterpilar uses MS technologies. The gentleman from CAT was not much of a speaker, compared to MS standards but it was still nice to see that they use many of the Toyota Way principles such as Scrum and Kanban.

The day ended with PJ Hough, Corporate VP, Office Program Management, talking about the Microsoft Office Division. It was amazing to see how much effort MS puts in the user behaviors to learn about their working habits. The most impressive way of learning how information workers are using office is by studying the user's eyes movements on the Office displays, captured by cameras place in front of the users. Clearly, MS doesn't spare any expense on the continuous improvement of their Office suite.

An evening event followed the conference but I couldn't attend as I was feeling a little under the weather.

The following day starting off by a word from Staci Trackey Meagher, Sales VP followed by a great, and I stress great! presentation on Windows 8 and the Consumerization of IT with Rich Reynolds, Chief Strategy & Marketing Officer (CSMO ?), Enterprise Segment of Microsoft Corporation. Staci reported that many attendees wished to have a better hands-on view by the presentators. I can definitely say that Mr. Reynolds was up to the challenge. He presented the benefits of the Metro interface and how it can help improve our productivity. Windows 8 brings the tablet to a whole new level; I think this will be the real business tablet information workers have been waiting for. With a full integration with AD and corporate GPOs, this tablet also has full OS and Office capabilities. By using the same interface for the Windows Phone, the PC and the XBox, Microsoft opens the door to a brand new world of mobility opportunities. I have tweeted in this session that I wanted a Win8 tablet asap. Boss, are you reading this? Traci also shared this video with the audience:

Then followed some breakout sessions. I chose to go to the Future of Communication & the Evolution of Voice with Giovanni Mezgec, GM Unified Communications. I should've gone to another session. As much as this was a good presentation, I have not heard anything new since I'm so deeply involved with this initiative at work.

The next session was Delivering the Next Generation of Productivity with Office 365 by Eric Swift, GM, Worldwide Productivity Sales (quite of a presumptuous title). Yet another good presentation. Still I wonder if there will ever be a fit for Office 365 for Global Excel. We have a well managed infrastructure and by leveraging SCCM, we avoid some of the pitfalls of having a multi versions of Office within our user community. Besides, many of the Office features are tightly integrated with our ERP that I wonder if may create more problems than solve some by using Office 365. It also raises some concerns about privacy (Patriot Act?) for Canadian users. This video was presented to show the size of the MS datacenters:

Next was Consumerization of IT: Changing the Game for desktop computing, with Scott Jackson, Sr. Director, WW Desktop and Devices (more of a humble title than the previous speaker). After this presentation, I felt GEM may be falling behind on embracing personal devices on this post-pc era that has started. As much as I agree with tightening our security policies, I still have to wonder if we're not missing a piece of the equation by ignoring a BYOD policy. Many of my fellow attendees either currently have a policy or will be implementing one.

Last presentation was a Keynote on Microsoft Research: Turning Ideas into Reality with Dr. Rick Rashid, Chief Research Officer. This was a tantalizing presentation. Dr. Rashid IS an awesome speaker. We started by learning that Microsoft employs more PhD than any of their competitors. They also have established partnerships with many of the most prestigious universities worldwide. We have learned a little more on the research behind the Kinect, AKA project Natal. Here's the presented video:

A overview of how Microsoft manages huge volumes of data was presented with the project Fetch Climate. This was also quite interesting. More details can be found here.

Dr. Rashid also explained some of the technology behind the product annouced in this ad (love the dad's face at the end of the clip)

This presentation ended the Summit on a very good note. I hope Dr. Rashid will be back next year.

Microsoft proposed another great networking opportunity by inviting the guests to the Novelty Hill/Januik Winery. Of course, I can never turned a wine tasting opportunity so I went even though I was leaving on a very early flight the morning after. I really enjoyed the event. The previous years, the event used to end right after the last presentation and guests were left on their own. This was another great idea from the organizers. I got to meet with many of my peers and had a great talk with the guys from Orckestra. Great young entrepreneurs they are!

My flight back home was as smooth as my flight to Seattle, got home early and recuperated from the 3 hour jet lag. Here are also a few pictures from this trip.

Hope you enjoy!